Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo came from somewhere else entirely, some foggy port nobody at the dojo could point to on a map, yet he chose this crumbling brotherhood of ronin-turned-wastrels like a man picking the one bar stool that wobbles just right. He still kept his blades honed out of old habit, a soldier's ritual he refused to abandon even as the rest of him surrendered to sake and idle nights, and it was during one such ritual, whetstone in hand inside the reeking sake house, that his own katana slipped and snapped his finger clean sideways. He didn't cry out so much as sigh, the sound of a disciplined man watching discipline betray him one more time, and he wrapped the finger himself with the flat, amused patience of someone who has seen worse omens in worse places. Unable to hold a blade properly for weeks, he picked up a brush instead and began scrawling what he called the Degen Handbook, part warning, part confession, part inside joke for fools just like him. He writes it slow, watchful as ever, half-hoping the next generation of drunks and gamblers will read it and laugh before they too try to sharpen a sword with a cup of sake still in their other hand.